Sure, that seems like something that could happen. However, meanwhile, in practice, my friend was having a mental break and the cops narrowed my friend's location down to 3 possible houses in a neighborhood.
Abusing emergency location services is a much better explanation here. They can ping the device for a short time and it'll do its best (using A-GPS and WiFi) to provide an accurate position, without involving anyone since it's fully automated. Collecting positions from a carrier's network infrastructure is a more complex and slow task in comparison.
